


At Least the War is Over

by Sassaphrass



Series: His Imperial Highness Luke Amidala [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Awesome Leia Organa, Dysfunctional Family, Family Bonding, Family Fluff, Gen, Peace, So Regular Leia Organa, estranged family, sibling feels, trying to connect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-08
Packaged: 2019-01-30 23:40:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12663834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sassaphrass/pseuds/Sassaphrass
Summary: The only thing Luke and Leia have in common are those nine months they spent in the womb and that time they brought down the Empire.It's hard to build a new family when the last one got blown to smithereens with the entire planet, but Leia's never thought anything worthwhile would be easy.





	At Least the War is Over

**Author's Note:**

> Technically this is set in a Luke raise by Vader Alternate Universe, but that's not super important to the fic. All you need to know is that Luke and Leia met later because of that and had a rockier road to becoming friends but still took down the Empire together.

This life was harder than Leia dreamed when she was young. The weight of everything. The hopes of an entire people that she alone carries crush her.

 

She'd never thought she'd live to see all her dearest hopes and dreams accomplished.

 

She certainly never expected to regret some of them.

 

Luke looks at her curiously and the force thrums through him in a way it doesn't seem to in anybody else.

 

Leia doesn't resent him that. She knows based on the snippets that her twin and Prince Korkie let drop that that affinity is more the result of desperation than anything else. That Luke, during his long long years of captivity, sunk his self deeply into Force to find strength, acceptance, and the knowledge he had needed to survive Vader with throat (mostly) uncrushed.

 

He had needed the Force like oxygen. It had been his escape and his salvation.

 

To Leia it's little more than a party trick. Which makes her feel a little...uncomfortable and slightly guilty.

 

 

It's just another thing that puts distance between her and her twin who's not quite her brother. She knows he wants to be her family. She knows he's desperate for her to be his, but...she had a family once, and she lost it. She doesn't want Luke to replace that. Even if he is the sort of inherently loveable person who leaves besotted Mandalorian generals and stormtroopers in his wake.

 

Luke certainly doesn't seem formidable or heartstopping, not sprawled out on her couch with his outfit half disassembled and his one cheek slightly red from where he's been leaning on his hand.

 

He doesn't really look like her. There's a delicacy to his features, and of course those too-blue eyes.

 

Luke raises his eyebrows when he sees her looking.

 

“Where's Han today?” he asks.

 

Leia shrugs. “Off somewhere doing something he assures me isn't illegal.”

 

Luke grins. “That's Han.”

 

Leia smiles. Han is something that at once pulls them together and sets them apart. Han is Leia's...not-husband, he's her family, the person she loves in an easy, complete way. They fit together in a way that's maddening and surprising and completely natural.

 

Han's something equally important to Luke, though in some way that's harder to explain or quantify. Han and Luke know the versions of each other that had been left behind in the path, and Leia suspects, each represents to the other the road not taken. They both decided to become someone different from the person they were when they were in love.

 

Or together. Fuck buddies. Whatever they were. She's asked them both multiple times, but the answer changes with each retelling.

 

And it doesn't matter anyway because, they're friends now, the sort of obnoxious old friends that have inside jokes and snigger over childish jokes they wouldn't laugh at with anyone else.

 

It's not something that usually bothers Leia. Actually, in the final days of Luke's official reign, he, Leia and Han had been something of a triumvirate. The young bloods, the movers and the shakers who'd grown up in the new world and were so sure they could make a better one. They didn't have the hangups that those who'd known and loved the Republic did.

 

But, the blush had faded. The honeymoon was over and building a new world was a long hard slog, which Han and Luke seemed to have conveniently bowed out of.

 

Which would have been alright, except that Leia is a mother now, and she'd been so sure that with the achievement of her goals that hunger that had been burning in her for as long as she could remember might shut up and settle down for a moment.

 

She'd been wrong. There were disappointments that came with dreams come true.

 

Like, her son. She'd thought somehow that it would feel like both the start and a continuation of her old family to start a new one. She'd thought she'd feel...different.

 

Instead Ben feels like an ending. A period at the end of the long story of the Organas and of Alderaan.

 

He's the first generation of both that will never know either.

 

That's why she names him Solo.

 

Luke knows this. He also knows that Leia is exhausted and overwhelmed with new motherhood and her senate duties, something that isn't helped by the way Luke has been blithely sailing through life since renouncing his official powers.

 

She knows he does work. That he teaches Jedi and has a boatload of diplomatic and charitable duties that he never neglects, but he also has arranged his life to allow for what seems to her to be a tremendous amount of lying around in the sun at his house on Yavin.

 

Which, she has to admit, is useful since Ben adores his uncle, as proven by the tiny body curled up and dead asleep on her brother's chest.

 

She glares half heartedly at the infant, trying not to feel like it's a betrayal. Ben is a difficult baby, but Luke can always make him

 

“I don't know how you do that.” she tells her brother.

 

Luke tilts his head and grins at her. “I think this little fella is Force sensitive. It's the same trick I used to use to head off Father's moods when he was working himself up into a rage.”

 

Leia swallows. The other thing about her brother is that his life has been so kriffing insane that he actually hasn't got the least conception of what is and isn't normal or acceptable. He knows his life was weird but doesn't have the slightest clue which parts of it were relatively normal, which were slightly weird, and which were completely horrifying.

 

“Are you saying you're Jedi mind-tricking my infant son?”

 

“Not exactly!” Luke hurriedly protests. “more...projecting a calming aura and thinking nice peaceful thoughts.”

 

He runs a finger over Ben's soft baby hair.

 

“I have to say babies are much more susceptible to it than Sith Lords.”

 

Leia is trying to swallow the bile that rises whenever she thinks about Vader. She wishes she could go back to the uncomplicated days of hating him with a fiery burning passion, because these days she doesn't really hate him any less but now it's mixed with pity and regret and something uncomfortably like longing and that potent little cocktail tends to make her want to either hurl her guts up or chuck vases at the wall.

 

 

“I would hope so.” she finally mutters.

 

Luke blinks and his smile falters. “Sorry. I shouldn't have mentioned it.”

 

Leia hugs herself a little. “It's fine.”

 

Luke makes a face at sleeping Ben. He adores that kid.

 

“You know I'm not sure I've actually seen a baby in person before this one.”

 

Leia who had been starting to drowse bolts awake at that. “What?”

 

Luke sort of shrugs. “It's not like they bring infants onto Star Destroyers. And you've got to be real careful with human babies on Tatooine. The climate's not good for them.”

 

Leia blinks. They haven't talked much about Tatooine. Their conversations tend to be rooted in the present or the future. Schemes, and plans, gossip and judgements.

 

For both of them looking back means staring past the chasm of loss and pain that neither of them really feel like sharing, and skirts dangerously close to the one topic that they cannot discuss without erupting into recriminations and hysterics: Bail Organa's choice to adopt only one child, and send the other to Tatooine.

 

She hums. “Tatooine sounds like something made up out of an old story.”

 

Luke stares at the ceiling. “It is kind of. It's a world that doesn't seem to change much.”

 

Leia humms and sinks back in her chair.

 

“What's it like?” she asks, looking blankly at the ceiling.

 

Luke eyes her from the couch. “I don't know. I spent a couple days there after Father died but, it's hard to say...it's better than it was, I think. The Hutts aren't as strong as they used to be...but it's the same: hot, dry and miserable as always.” There's a long pause. “You could ask Han about it, if you're curious.” He looks away and he trails off.

 

“Tatooine was a long time ago for me.” he admits.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leia loves her son, she does, and she loves her husband and her work. But all together it seems like too much. It doesn't have to be, she knows that. She could take time away from the new government to be with her infant, she could ask Han to give up his rambles, she could leave Ben with the nanny droids more often.

 

But, nanny droids are a-...that is they were a rarity on Alderaan and it seems wrong to leave him with a machine. That doesn't stop her from bringing it along as she walks over to Luke's house next door.

 

She finds him doing a handstand and keeping the various items his bodyguards are tossing at him whirling around his head with the Force. He folds down out of it when he hears Ben screaming, looks at her with a sigh and holds out his hands for the baby, who stops crying almost instantly.

 

Leia kind of wants to start crying.

 

Luke looks at her sympathetically as he cradles the infant. “You could borrow some of my bodyguards.” offers. “A couple of them have kids, and most of them have younger siblings.”

 

Leia mutely shakes her head, because Luke's bodyguard situation is already so far past acceptable, what with him using them to cover his illicit Jedi activities, and the idea of him lending them to her like a holocron is a bit uncomfortable.

 

Luke shrugs. “Suit yourself. I'm sure they wouldn't mind. It's not like there's much else to do.”

 

Leia glances at the soldiers who line the walls, all of them veterans of Luke's rise, and the Empire's fall. She can't help but think that they probably very much enjoy their time lazing about in luxury while pretending to guard Luke from imaginary assassins.

 

Her brother carefully deposits the now sleeping Ben into the hover-cradle. He gives it an experimental push and it glides easily. He glances at her.

 

“Well, why don't we go walk in the garden? Give my poor guards something to do?”

 

He makes eye contact with one of his loyal soldiers and the man nods. All but one of the guards file out to search and secure the gardens.

 

They wait a moment in silence before the remaining guard gives Luke a signal and they begin their progress towards the gardens at the back of the house nudging the floating cradle along between them.

 

The gardens are beautiful. But, then Luke has exquisite taste, and tends to surround himself with beautiful things, when he's not busy surrounding himself with various bits of junk that he's rescued from the scrap-pile for reasons only decipherable to himself.

 

The remaining guard trails after them, and Leia sometimes catches glimpses of the rest of Luke's protection detail as they patrol the perimeter. It hadn't occurred to her to wonder why Luke, who loves gardens, hates to be indoors, and had nearly unlimited resources would have chosen a house with so little property attached, it galls her to realize he'd done it for the convenience of his bodyguards.

 

It's not that he shouldn't have done that- it's just that he shouldn't have had to.  
  
And there it was again that uncomfortable gulf between them. She had been safe, and Luke had not.

 

She sighs. Luke looks at her expectantly.

 

“I've been thinking of our mother lately.” she finally confesses. He hums in acknowledgment and looks down at Ben.

 

“That's not so surprising, is it? Considering...” he finally replies softly.

 

Leia scowls at him and huffs. “I don't know anything about her. Not really.”

 

Luke shrugs. “So? Does anyone? She was enigmatic when she was alive, and the rise and fall of the Empire only muddied the historical waters.”

 

Leia kind of wants to punch her brother. “That's not- UGH! Why are you being so difficult about this?”

 

Luke shrugs and then relents. “I spent a lot of time wondering about her. Trying to find something that felt real, something that felt like a connection to her...but, it's like grasping smoke. The people who knew her best are dead, or just...gone. You'll drive yourself crazy going in circles over it...” he thinks about it for a minute. “I have a good biography of her's. If you want to borrow it.”

 

Leia pauses. Her father had been close with Padme Amidala, her closest political ally and friend. Something Luke knows, she's sure. When Leia had been young and particularly frustrated with the suffocating demands of Alderaani royalty, he had once suggested Padme Amidala as a role-model, since during the Trade Blockade she had displayed both the poise and decorum that Leia balked at, and the ability to climb through windows and shoot bad-guys with blasters that she had longed for.

 

She wonders now if Bail had brought Queen Amidala to her attention because he had wanted her to, in some way, know the woman she hadn't known was her birth-mother.

 

If that had been his intention it had failed spectacularly. Leia had not been impressed with the poised calm young woman in the holovids, and she had not failed to notice, that excepting the Trade Federation Blockade, all of Amidala attempts at a better world had failed.

 

She had been particularly unimpressed with some of the romantic legends surrounding her death- dying of heartbreak over the republic, or despair or choosing to stand on principle and die rather than capitulate to a dictatorial power.

 

Leia's not sure how she feels about her past self who had been so sure of her own strength and righteousness, and been so quick to judge a woman who took a quieter path. She's old enough now to know that sometimes there are only hard choices. It's something Luke made her realize, funnily enough.

 

“You must know something!” Leia insists. “Your-... _our_ father must have mentioned her. You were known to the entire galaxy as her son, for years, people must had told you stories, you must have found things out-”

 

Luke sighs and scuffs a foot in the dirt. “Yeah, of course they did, but...it was usually the sort of thing you'd hear on a newsreel: she visited, she was lovely and gracious and I never washed the cup she used. That sort of thing. It was never people that really knew her. I honestly don't know much that's not on public record.”

 

“Vader knew her.”

 

Luke sighs again, and sits on a stone bench. Leia joins him. He stares at the gravel pathway and gently nudges Ben's cradle to keep it rocking.

 

“Yes, Vader knew her and Vader loved her and I used to wonder what sort of woman she must have been in private that she, that they could have had that.” he murmurs.

 

Leia reaches out to hold his hand, but then stops and draws it back.

 

Luke looks at her, head cocked. “Here's something that the public doesn't know: Vader didn't murder her.”

 

Leia blinks. “What?”

 

Luke nods. “Obi-Wan told me, when I last talked to him. He held her hand while she died, and no one could understand it. There was nothing medically wrong with her...she just died.”

 

“I thought Vader killed her.”

 

Luke shrugs. “Vader may have been responsible, the force works in mysterious ways and he did force choke her a few hours earlier, but if she survived the initial assault it shouldn't have killed her. She gave birth, but that shouldn't have killed her. There was nothing medically wrong with her...she just died.”

 

Luke reaches out and takes Leia's hand. “It's funny...I got so angry at Obi-Wan when he told me that,” he tells her. “Because, I had always been so sure that Vader had killed her. I used to think I'd die just like that. He'd force choke me in a rage, and then spend the rest of his life regretting it. But, turns out, even if he was responsible, murdering her was the one thing he wasn't actually guilty of.”

 

“I used to think I remembered her.” she blurts out, since apparently they're baring souls and telling secrets. “Not Amidala, specifically but my birth mother. I thought I remembered her- that she had been very beautiful and very sad.”

 

Luke hums and looks at the flowers in his garden. “Maybe you do remember her, after all she would have had good reason to be very sad, and we already know that she was beautiful.”

 

Leia tries to smile, but finds herself looking down at Ben instead. She feels tears burning in her throat.

 

“It's just hard.” she admits. “Families are large on Alderaan, and Ben just has us.”

 

Luke frowns at her. “The Naberries are still alive.” he points out, “It doesn't have to be just us. And Han of course.”

 

Leia stares at him and blinks. She has never seriously considered reaching out to her mother's surviving family, partly because she feels so disconnected from her mother, and partly because she knows that all of Luke's attempts have ended in disaster.

 

Last time he visited them he lasted less than a day before climbing out of a window to run off with Han, while his bodyguards covered for him and while Leia is painfully aware of the fact that Luke's interpersonal skills in informal settings are not exactly great, she can't help but think that it must have been a failure on both sides for things to go _that_ badly.

 

“Honestly, I wouldn't think I'd be welcome, and I don't think I could handle it if I ended up being a disappointed to them.”

 

Luke scoffs. “Your kidding- you're exactly the sort of child of Padme Amidala that they'd want. You were raised with proper manners, you're in politics and you're a girl, which is important since Naboo is matrilineal...” he trails off and looks into the distance. “I bet you'd say the right thing and charm them right off. They'd love you right away.”

 

Leia scowls. “Do they even know I exist?”

 

“Oh...yeah, I outed you the last time I was there. They freaked, I jumped out the window.” he waves his hand vaguely. “The rest is history.”

 

Leia stares at him. “You just casually dropped it into conversation that their tragically murdered daughter had another secret child that they also hadn't known about?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Leai gapes at him and he blushes. “

 

“How did you even manage to stay alive under the Emperor if you just blurt sensitive information out like that all the time?!” she asks incredulously.

 

He laughs. “Because, I'm so bad at keeping my mouth shut, that everybody just assumes they know all my secrets.”

 

Leia snorts,and Ben starts fussing.

 

“Aw, come here you little krayt dragon!” Luke coos picking up the infant and boucing him gently as the boy wails.

 

He stands and walks the baby around trying to get him to calm down.

 

Leia rubs her temple. She loves her son, she just wishes he would scream a little less.

 

 

 

 

Leia ignores Luke's warning about chasing smoke and tries to find something of the woman in the icon her mother had become. It's difficult. Padme Amidala like all Nabooan queens had a serene public face, and rarely showed anything of her true self in public.

 

She reads the stories, which have become more like legends, and she tries to find something that seems familiar, or true in what she finds.

 

It's difficult, but there are small things. Her careful style reminds Leia of Luke and the way he is so particular about how he dresses. The devotion of her handmaidens speaks to something Leia does not see, some personal magnetism that has been lost in the dry tomes of history. The impulsive maddening risk of her antics during the blockade, and the beginning of the clone wars sounds like the sort of harebrained scheme Leia herself might dream up with Han's help.

 

She sees her mother's shadow in the way people who knew her talk about her. In the way, when Luke began to do good, everyone had pointed his mother's legacy and suddenly began to doubt that he was an imposter like they'd always believed.

 

She sees it in the way, even now, a generation or more after her death, people on Naboo still talk about her, despite the fact that so much of what she had done, what she had meant, and believed in and championed, had been suppressed by the Empire.

 

Occasionally, she even sees it in the curve of her brother's cheek, the shape of his eye, the quirk of his mouth. Even more rarely, she sees it in her own features.

 

Luke does not look much like their mother. But, then, except for the colour of her hair and her eyes, neither does Leia.

 

Leia was robbed of Padmé Amidala, and that can never be undone. But, Leia has been robbed of so many things. Her home, her planet, her family, her people and her culture. She's tired of keeping a tally of all the ways she has been wronged.

 

She prefers to keep track of all the things she's won back from the Empire. Her brother with his smiles and his gentle voice is at the top of that list, but there's so much else. The Senate, the Republic. The way Han smirks at her when he catches her eye across the room. The way Ben claps his pudgy hands and screams is delight when Luke uses the Force make lights float around him.

 

There is also the Naberries who are as careful with her as she is with them, and seem to have learned a few lessons from the various disasters that have been their meetings with Luke. They will never replace the family she lost on Alderaan. But, it's something.

 

And, they are more than happy to rock Ben to sleep on days when Leia is busy with government business, Luke is occupied with the Jedi, and Han is away on business.

 

One day she may even work up the courage to ask them about the daughter they lost, who they loved so much that the wound is still fresh twenty-five years later. One day, but not quite yet.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Something I wrote a while ago for this verse. Hope you guys liked it. I have a few other bits and pieces so if you all like this I might put those up too. Comments are the best!!
> 
> Title from the Stars song of the same name.


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